The Muse That Sings is a unique behind-the-scenes look at both twentieth-century music and the nuts and bolts of creative work. Here, twenty-five of America's leading composers--from Adams to Zorn, from Bolcom to Vierk--talk candidly about their craft, their motivations, their difficulties, and how they how proceed from musical idea to finished composition.

While focusing on the process and the stories behind specific works, the composers also touch on topics that will interest anyone involved in creative work. They discuss teachers and mentors, the task of revision,...

The Muse That Sings is a unique behind-the-scenes look at both twentieth-century music and the nuts and bolts of creative work. Here, twenty-five of America's leading composers--from Adams to Zorn, from Bolcom to Vierk--talk candidly about their craft, their motivations, their difficulties, and how they how proceed from musical idea to finished composition.

While focusing on the process and the stories behind specific works, the composers also touch on topics that will interest anyone involved in creative work. They discuss teachers and mentors, the task of revision,...

Drawing on five years of research and over 100 interviews with students, colleagues and family members of flutist Marcel Moose, author McCutchan distills a portrait of this man.

Louisiana s Atchafalaya River Basin, the heart and soul of Acadiana, or Cajun country, is the focus of this compelling narrative by Ann McCutchan. A masterful weaving of cultural and environmental history, "River Music" also tells the life story of Louisiana musician, naturalist, and sound documentarian Earl Robicheaux.
With Robicheaux as her guide, McCutchan embarks on a musical, visual, literary, and historical tour of the Atchafalaya, where bayous, swamps, marshes, and river delta country have long sustained nature and culture, even as industry has changed both the landscape and the...

When you lose your parents just as you have left home for graduate school glad to finally be away from a life and place you found stifling how do you make your way in a world with no home to go back to? For Ann McCutchan, whose parents died in a car accident when she was twenty-three, the answer was to keep moving, away from the dream her mom and dad had so hopefully embraced in her childhood, and away from the locus of that dream, the state of Florida in the 1960s.
In this coming-of-age memoir, McCutchan, a writer and musician, returns to Florida to reconcile with the life she had...